


No Easy Way Down

by Jane St Clair (3jane)



Category: Battlestar Galactica (2003)
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-08-06
Updated: 2011-08-06
Packaged: 2017-10-22 06:41:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,154
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/235016
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/3jane/pseuds/Jane%20St%20Clair
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They're all locked up together, now.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Easy Way Down

 

They all get cold at night.

 

Sharon first. She curls in on herself, shivers. Helo can always hear her. Grinds his teeth against it and remembers wet-slick-raingirl on Caprica and the first time they frakked.

 

He doesn't actually call it that, in his head. It's frakking *love*. With his warm-soft-crying mechanical girl. He's almost reached the point where the dissonance doesn't bother him anymore.

 

But it comes back to this, over and over again. He tells himself he's over it, the mechanism/this woman he's in love with. That it's all the same Sharon, just difference versions of her, like the way you never know the same woman anyone else knows. Like his Starbuck is different from the one Apollo knows is different from the one the Old Man knows. That it's like that.

 

He has to want her. It's his baby in her.

 

Anyway.

 

Helo second. He's lived in space most of his adult life, and he spent months running through the wreckage of his not-homeworld, wet and cold and irradiated. He should be immune. It doesn't make sense that it's here in Galactica's brig that he gets cold. They didn't send him in here to suffer, not the way Cain wanted him to suffer.

 

He doesn't think they did.

 

Tyrol last. Because he's bigger than them, or thicker, anyway. He looks like a warm guy. One of the ones you don't want to sit next to in a car on a hot day. The kind women like to curl up against. Women always told Helo he had cold feet.

 

Sharon didn't tell him that.

 

He gets up and crawls to her. In the absolute dark in here, which is better than having the lights on all the time. Takes his blanket with him, down along the floor until he can reach her too-thin/swelling body. Press his face into her neck.

 

She doesn't always touch him back, anymore.

 

The night the marines brought Helo and Tyrol back from Pegasus, threw them in here with Sharon, she wouldn't even look at them. Stayed curled in on herself in the corner, wrapped in her blanket, keening to herself. Gone somewhere in her head, maybe, and that probably pushed her closer to human in Helo's own mind than anything else could have.

 

The second day, she touched Tyrol's hand as he crouched over her. Just for a second.

 

The fifth day, she whispered, "Helo."

 

The ninth day, they broke their corners.

 

Nobody refurnished the cell when Helo and Tyrol went in. They just threw in a couple of worn-out foam pads and a couple of blankets and left them alone. Sometimes, people bring them food; nobody talks to them. Nobody here, after all. Just the Cylon girl and the two guys who killed another guy over her. And Sharon wasn't looking at them and he and Tyrol had nothing they could say to each other, really, so they just each picked a corner and sat in it.

 

He remembers waking up in the middle of the night and staring into the dark with this idea that the Old Man was watching them. Close. Other side of the wire.

 

The Old Man put them here. Walked into the room where they'd thrown Helo and Tyrol after they dragged them back from Pegasus and watched them for a while. Then the marines came to drag them away again, away across the ship, and threw them in with Sharon, in the box.

 

While the lights are on, they mostly stick to their own spaces. Look at their hands. Helo has a rubber ball, but there aren't really the kind of walls you can bounce one against, so he does a lot of push-ups. The others do too, but not together, or with him. They don't interfere. Don't watch.

 

Nobody here.

 

Except that night they crawled out the first time. Helo got to Sharon's cot and found Tyrol already there, sitting cross-legged and leaning against the frame. Not touching her, but close enough she could probably feel him radiating warmth. When Tyrol reached over and brushed knuckles against Helo's shoulder, he could feel the heat before the touch.

 

They were all so cold.

 

So maybe they curled up together. It was cold, and they nested on the floor. Sharon in between them, careful about her body and curled in around herself, but she didn't get any more tense with Tyrol behind her and Helo in front than she was, lying by herself. Close enough to brush up against each other, the first time, but not close enough to share blankets. She whimpered every time she started to dream.

 

She dreams all the time. He touched her eyelids once, felt the eyes flicker underneath.

 

She pulled him in, eventually. Hands between them and legs touching, close enough to feel her breath on his face.

 

His Sharon. She breathes.

 

Radiant heat from behind her. Tyrol against her back, closer than Helo got but outside the range of her breath.

 

And now he's used to waking when he hears shift-change boots on the floors outside. They mean he has five minutes until the lights come on. Time to get back to his own space.

 

And the first night she stretched out for them. Tyrol on one side, Helo on the other, Sharon on her back between them. One hand on each neck, pulling them in. She has these thin shoulders, almost perfectly square. Hard muscles across them, because however long Helo's been bored and locked up, she's been inside longer. He can hurt her, but not by resting his head on her body.

 

Hand on her belly. It's tighter than it was. Rounder. He strokes it all over, every night.

 

Tyrol's fingers mesh with his, sometimes. And he knows Tyrol has his own issues about Sharon and the baby and the things those two -- the other Sharon and Tyron -- talked about. Before. But he still touches her. Strokes her up to just below her breasts, down to the waist of her pants. They could avoid each other, probably, take different paths. They don't. So here and there while they're touching, their fingers tangle.

 

Hot hand on his cold one. Sharon's body under them.

 

And this night Sharon lifts their tangled hands to her mouth and kisses them both, together.

 

When Helo lifts his head up to kiss her, she lets him. He can feel Tyrol's breath on his face. Feels the brush of the man's hair as he leans in to kiss her after.

 

Very, very still for a long time. Helo forgets, sometimes, that she hasn't said Tyrol's name yet. And he's a guy who'd wait for that. Because this is *his* Sharon. His baby in her. Same/not the same girl.

 

He can still feel Tyrol's breath.

 

Helo has to sit up for this. Leans across Sharon and catches Tyrol by the hair at the base of his skull.

 

Pulls him in and kisses him.

 

It's not as smooth as he wants it to be. Tyrol doesn't give easy. He doesn't move, doesn't soften under Helo's mouth, just stays there with Sharon's taste on his lips, a little bit open but not offering anything up.

 

Helo breaks the kiss. Pulls him in even farther until they're mouth-to-ear and Helo whispers, "Come on."

 

"No."

 

"Please."

 

He has to let go; can't just hover there forever. He curls up next to Sharon, back against the wall. Spends the rest of the night like that.

 

It's day before Tyrol looks over at him -- actual eye contact with the lights on, just like they weren't all pretending not to exist -- and says, "Why?" Like he expects an answer.

 

Across the cell, Sharon says. "Just. Please."

 

Three words in sixteen hours.

 

In the dark, they don't say anything at all. But Tyrol's fingers reach across Sharon's body to Helo and grip his hand. Lift it to his lips and kiss it.

 

And then Sharon actually pulls herself up to sit and pulls Tyrol in. Kisses him. Kisses Helo after.

 

It shifts something. They sleep closer, touch more. Nights they peel off shirts and stroke one another. He already knows a few things about Sharon's body, but he hasn't had enough time with her to have it really memorized. Tyrol touches her like he's forgotten. He touches Helo like it's a place he's never been.

 

No kidding.

 

Kiss Sharon under her right breast. Kiss Tyrol when their lips tangle there. Kiss them both when the angles intersect.

 

Sharon touches him back. She lies on her side with her back pressed against Tyrol and runs her hands down Helo's chest. Hooks her fingers in his pants. Kisses him and strokes him and, really, before, they never had sex like this. They frakked and they kissed and that was really it. None of the mouths-and-fingers intensity she's building between them now.

 

She touches him like she knows every frakking thing about him.

 

Hands on his cock, mouth on his mouth, and in the middle of it he feels Tyrol's hand brush his hip. Pull away.

 

There are other nights it stays.

 

Or when Tyrol goes down on her. Because really, he *does* know every frakking thing about her. About her body. Knows what touches she likes, which twist will make her come. He had years with her, before.

 

Helo crawls down while Sharon's still shaking and licks her off Tyrol's face.

 

Between them, they just might be everything she needs. Almost enough to hold her together. After all, they didn't let those bastards get her.

 

He should be proud of that.

 

Except. He wakes up sometimes -- during the night but more often during the day -- with the look on Tyrol's face as he beat the frakker's head in etched into his retinas. Sharon screaming at the back of his skull. Blood and sweat and fear.

 

Mushroom clouds over Caprica. The blonde woman's face exploding when Sharon killed her. Acid smell of that dead planet. Cylons hunting him. Blood.

 

The first time Helo screams in the night, it's Tyrol who crawls on top of him and eases him down.

 

End of the week is shower day. They go alone into an enlisted shower-space, where they have ten minutes to scrub a week's worth of misery off. Hot blinding water. Guards with shoot-to-kill orders outside.

 

All of them naked under blinding lights.

 

They still don't talk. Sharon sighs like the heat's knocked her breath out. Tyrol groans.

 

Helo could be making noise. He can't really tell; the water keeps striking against his skull and sometimes he thinks he's deaf.

 

That night, Tyrol howls in his sleep. Sharon knocks against him, tries to wake him, and he flails out. Hits her in the face.

 

Helo doesn't see it happen, but he doesn't need to. Like his ears, his eyes aren't really necessary anymore.

 

And he's going to kill Tyrol for hurting her, but before he can, Sharon pulls back and slaps Tyrol hard. Wakes him up.

 

Frak.

 

"Oh gods Sharon I'm *sorry*."

 

And that's it, except in the morning Sharon's purple-turning-black all around one eye. Marines drag them all down to the infirmary and they get to listen to Cottle interrogating Sharon behind closed curtains. Like he thinks they'd hurt her on purpose.

 

And Helo finds himself talking. Babbling about accidents and how dangerous it is, not being able to see each other in the dark, and maybe it's been longer than he thinks since the last time he said much of anything, because his voice sounds strange to him, and his throat hurts.

 

He's shouting. He doesn’t really understand that until the marines come to pin him down. He doesn't stop screaming even when they're all sitting on him. He's the new trauma king, and he didn't even realize.

 

Eventually they give him something for the freak-out and Cottle decides they're not actively hurting Sharon, and he looks like he wants to throw all of them into therapy, but prisoners don't get limited psych resources, so back to the brig they go. And after the lights go out, Tyrol and Sharon both come to Helo. Wrap themselves around him and hold him down.

 

Tyrol kisses him a lot that night. Sweet and soft, and then harder after he remembers Helo's not a girl.

 

Holds him down and mouths him all over. Heavy body on top of him and Sharon's lighter one beside him, both of them stroking him like they expect him to break.

 

When the boots come, those minutes before morning, doesn't have anywhere to go. Sharon's pressed so close against him he can't shift her, and Tyron's still lying across him and holding him down. So they're all still naked and tangled when the lights come on. Buried in each other.

 

The Old Man's there, watching them. Helo has no idea what the look on his face means. It almost looks like he's been standing there all night.

 


End file.
